Men In Blue (Badge of Honor 1)

Chief Inspector Coughlin nodded, and then turned and took Mrs. Patricia Payne’s arm and led her to Dutch Moffitt’s front door.

FIVE

With some difficulty, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl extricated his car from the cars jammed together on the streets, driveways, and alleys near the residence of Captain Richard C. Moffitt. He turned onto Holme Avenue, in the direction of Pennypack Circle.

When he was safely into the flow of traffic, he leaned over and took the microphone from the glove compartment.

“Isaac Twenty-three,” he said into it, and when they came back at him, he said he needed a location on Two-Eleven, which was the Second District blue-and-white he’d commandeered from Mac McGovern to escort Miss Louise Dutton.

“I have him out of service at WCBL-TV at Seventeenth and Locust, Inspector,” the radio operator finally told him. “Thirty-five minutes ago.”

“Thank you,” Wohl said, and put the microphone back inside the glove compartment and slammed the door.

There would be time, he decided, to see what the medical examiner had turned up about the female doer. There was no question that there would be other questions directed at him by his boss, Chief Inspector Coughlin, and very possibly by Commissioner Czernick or even the mayor. Peter Wohl believed the Boy Scouts were right; it paid to be prepared.

A battered Ford van pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office at Civic Center Boulevard and University Avenue. The faded yellow van had a cracked windshield. On the sides were still legible vestiges of a BUDGET RENT-A-CAR logotype. The chrome grille was missing, as was the right headlight and its housing. The passenger-side door had apparently encountered something hard and sharp enough to slice the door skin like a knife. There was a deep, but not penetrating, dent on the body on the same side. The body was rusted through at the bottom of the doors, and above the left-rear fender well.

The vehicle had forty-two unanswered traffic citations against it, most for illegal parking, but including a half dozen or so for the missing headlight, the cracked windshield, an illegible license plate, and similar misdemeanor violations of the Motor Vehicle Code.

Two men got out of the van. One of them was young, very large, and bearded. He was wearing greasy blue jeans, and a leather band around his forehead to keep his long, unkempt hair out of his

eyes. After he got out of the passenger’s side, the driver, a small, smooth-shaven, somewhat weasel-faced individual wearing a battered gray sweatshirt with the legend support your local sheriff printed on it slid over and got out after him. They walked into the building.

Staff Inspector Peter Wohl and Sergeant Zachary Hobbs of Homicide were standing by a coffee vending machine in the basement, drinking from Styrofoam cups. Wohl shook his head when he saw them.

“Hello, Inspector,” the weasel-faced small man, who was Lieutenant David Pekach of the Narcotics Squad, said.

“Pekach, does your mother know what you do for a living?” Wohl replied, offering his hand.

Pekach chuckled. “God, I hope not.” He looked at Hobbs. “You’re Sergeant Hobbs?”

“Yes, sir,” Hobbs said.

“You know Officer McFadden?” Pekach asked, and both Wohl and Hobbs shook their heads, no.

“Charley, this is Staff Inspector Wohl,” the weasel-faced man said, “And Sergeant Hobbs. Officer Charley McFadden.”

“How do you do, sir?” Officer McFadden asked, respectfully, to Wohl and Hobbs each in turn.

“Where is she?” Pekach asked.

“In there,” Wohl said, nodding at double metal doors. “He’s not through with her.”

“Don’t tell me you have a queasy stomach, Inspector?” Pekach asked, innocently.

“You bet your ass, I do,” Wohl said.

Pekach walked in. McFadden followed him.

Unidentified White Female Suspect was on a stainless steel table. She was naked, her legs spread, one arm lying beside her, the other over her head. Body fluids dripped from a corner drain on the table into a stainless steel bucket on the tile floor.

A bald-headed man wearing a plastic apron over surgical blues stopped what he was doing and looked up curiously and unpleasantly at Pekach and McFadden. What he was doing was removing Unidentified White Female Suspect’s heart from the opening he had made in her chest.

“I’m Lieutenant Pekach, Doctor,” Pekach said. “We just want to get a look at her face.”

The medical examiner shrugged, and went on with what he was doing.

“Jesus,” Pekach said. “What did he shoot her with?”